Mac users luck out when it comes to managing audio files, with exceptional choices like Snapper from AudioEase and the all-powerful AudioFinder, not to mention – if your needs are light – features like Leopard’s QuickLook. Windows users, by contrast, have been mostly left out. But good news: we’ve got a lovely solution for you.

TaggedFrog is a free/donationware utility for Windows XP and Vista that brings some powerful file management facilities. And what’s great here is that it looks dead-simple to use.

As the name implies, the tool is built around tagging files. Drag and drop files to the iTunes-style Library, then tag them with identifying keywords. That’s it: now the files you need just show up automagically, and you can navigate them by tag. You can also tag directly from a context menu in the Windows Explorer file manager, and if there is keyword metadata in the file itself, TaggedFrog can import those keywords. (For tips on cleaning up that menu, see my previous how-to piece below.)

That’s all nice, but the one essential feature that had been missing is audio file preview. You can thank our friend Brad of Brad Sucks for nagging the developer until it got added:

Important: don’t forget as I did (doh!) that you need an extension to make audio preview work. Look for Croak on the download page. Drag the Croak folder to your [install]/TaggedFrog/extensions, and you’re good to go. An extra “extended information” pane will appear with a play button, optional auto-play, and loop options.

With audio preview, this already-lovely interface is now the perfect tool for managing your audio projects.

Also, what I really like about this approach is that you add only what you need to the library, in ad-hoc fashion. The problem with even the more elegant tools on the Mac OS Finder is that they all tend to assume you want to index huge chunks of your drive, or manage everything from the file system. TaggedFrog by contrast lets you cherry-pick that handful of files you actually need and store metadata about them, while ignoring everything else. You can even move the files when you tag them, so that you actually store them in a logical place instead of … ahem … a random folder in which you happened to leave something.

Of course, if you want actual sample editing and other fancy features in your file utility, you’ll want options like the aforementioned Mac tools. But if you do your editing in other tools anyway and just need to stop losing files, this seems about perfect.

If you start using this and come up with a useful workflow, do let us know. And if you like it, do donate to keep it free.

Think you may misunderstand what this is. For starters, it's not a Mac port. It's built in .net. (I don't like the Mac-style interface, particularly, but that's just a skin – hopefully we'll get an option to turn that off.)

And the whole point is, some people want this functionality independent of their audio editor / audio player. The software still has some rough patches in it – more improvements are promised – but I'm often managing projects that include different kinds of media and stuff built in different tools, in different project folders, etc. This looks like a great way to consolidate files.

Um, year 1978 I think we were talking CMOS, not Windows, but…

http://www.bradsucks.net/ Brad

Also MP3 tags are very different than Flickr/delicious non-hierarchical tags. I've tried to adapt many different MP3 players to use in this way with no luck.

Jan

I've been looking for something like this for ages. Tried waiting for Chicken System's Sample Manage Tool, but that's "in development" since 2007. Their website now states "Sampler Tools", but i'm afraid that's gonna take another couple of years…

Will try TaggedFrog in the next few days, thanks Peter!

Carl Lofgren

Check out Sample Tagger. Have some smart tools for quickly marking up sample data. Only for Windows though.

Mitchell Kehoe

Man, that Andrew guy who posted first certainly has some bitterness…

The problem I have with this is it lacks the "built right into your normal folders" aspect of snapper, but also lacks the advanced editing of audiofinder… so you don't get the real benefit of either. I guess its a good way to organize yourself if you don't organize all of your files in old fashioned folder hierarchies anyway, but I know this does absolutely nothing for my workflow when I'm using windows (usually when collabing with a friend who only has windows on his computer… I use both OSes pretty regularly, but its always OSX for my own music)

http://www.createdigitalmusic.com Peter Kirn

@Mitchell: Sure thing — it's definitely not for everyone. I will say, though, as I talk to people almost no two people have the same file system workflow. That's doubly odd given that most mainstream file managers on all operating systems make a lot of the same assumptions.

Kyran

Looks nice, but I stopped waiting for the perfect file manager a year ago and just organised the old school way: folders. It's not perfect, but it works good enough.